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Silent Scenery Panel

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/silentscenerypanel-hellboy2.png
Hellboy: Conqueror Worm, Chapter 2, panel 2. This is the entire panel.

A panel in a Comic Book, Manga, or Webcomic featuring just scenery. No characters, no dialogue from off-scene characters, and minimal (if any) narration.

Silent Scenery Panels can serve several purposes. Most often, one is used at the beginning of a scene, as the Sequential Art equivalent of an Establishing Shot or Aspect Montage. Used in the middle of a scene, they can imply movement or the passage of time, without the artist having to laboriously redraw characters. They can also serve as pacing, slowing down a story that would otherwise seem frantic.

When the Silent Scenery Panel is also a Splash Panel, the result is almost invariably Scenery Porn.

Compare Beat Panel.


Examples

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    Comic Books 
  • Hellboy has a lot of close-up shots of whatever artwork or statuary appears in the scene. (And make no mistake, wherever the characters go, there is always artwork or statuary.) On occasion the panel contains statuary or some creature saying Hellboy's "real" name (Anung Un Rama), usually when he's explaining that he doesn't want to be The Antichrist. Mignola seems to eschew large Splash Panels in favor of close-ups of thematically important details.
  • Marvel Comics had a month when all their comics were to be silent, so all scenery panels were this way by necessity. One wonders how much money Marvel saved by not having to pay any letterers that month.
  • This was done extensively in the first storyline in Concrete. It has a page filled with tiny panels showing how laborious it is to swim across the Atlantic Ocean.
  • A lot of Batman stories end with a panel of Gotham's skyline.

    Manga 
  • Umi no Misaki might hold the record for the most panels without any characters or action in them. The manga is full of panels showing of the beautiful island that are used by the author to set the mood.
  • Tsutomu Nihei uses these a lot.
  • Ashinano Hitoshi loves these things. At least one chapter of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou contains no dialogue at all, and several others come quite close.
  • Inio Asano frequently uses these and they are generally extremely detailed; he uses scanned photos he has taken and shots from Unreal Engine renderings which are then touched up by hand to create these.
  • Yotsuba&! uses these quite often to establish the scenery. Sometimes they only include a tiny fragment of the sky or a close-up shot of some leaves in a tree. They are usually drawn with near-photographic realism.

    Web Comics 

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